Square's CFO on What's Driving the Company's Growth
Square’s focus on omni-channel retail has been its biggest growth driver, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told Cheddar Wednesday.
“It’s really about helping entrepreneurs meet their buyers wherever they are...in the same way that big businesses are approaching it,” Friar said.
The payments processing platform beat revenue estimates in its Q4 earnings.
The company’s Cash app -- a Venmo-style money transfer app -- is also fueling its rapid growth with its 7 million monthly active users as of the last quarter.
“We find a lot of underbanked also using that,” added Friar. “That same theme of economic empowerment applies to individuals as well as to small businesses.”
Building on this theme of economic empowerment, the company recently launched a film series titled “For Every Kind of Dream,” which highlights small business owners around the U.S.
Their most recent film in the series focuses on SisterHearts -- a thrift store and organization that helps formerly incarcerated men and women transition back into society.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
